The first thing to melt in a British heatwave isn’t tarmac – it’s any pretence that the country is prepared for hot weather.
Every summer now follows a familiar script: temperatures climb beyond the high twenties and trains struggle, roads buckle and offices become unbearable. Then, after a few uncomfortable days, the weather changes and everyone forgets about it until the following year.
Except… some people simply can’t. Millions of schoolchildren and hundreds of thousands of teachers spend the hottest days of the year inside buildings that were never designed to cope with prolonged heat. I should know – because I am one of them.
Air-conditioned offices remain the preserve of large corporations and modern developments, while much of Britain’s school estate is still made up of ageing Victorian buildings with poor insulation, single glazing and classrooms that become greenhouses by mid-afternoon. It isn’t simply uncomfortable, but potentially a genuine health and educational issue.
Britain’s workplace temperature laws belong to a different climate. Employers are expected to provide a safe working environment, with guidance that indoor workplaces should not fall below 16°C (13°C for physically demanding jobs). Yet, there is no legal maximum temperature at all.
That might have seemed reasonable when 30°C days were a rarity. Today, after the UK recorded its first temperature above 40°C in 2022 – and with heatwaves becoming more frequent – it looks increasingly indefensible. Classrooms, offices and warehouses routinely exceed outdoor temperatures, but the law offers no point at which conditions are simply deemed too hot to work. As we adapt to a warmer future, that is a glaring omission.
Schools expose the problem starkly. Teachers improvise with whatever they have: windows are forced open and lessons shortened, concentration evaporates, PE is cancelled, water bottles become essential.
In many schools, even basic fans are scarce because budgets have been so overstretched. Mobile air-conditioning units are often prohibitively expensive to run and impractical in ageing buildings with outdated electrical systems (not enough sockets). As RAAC revealed, many schools are barely fit for purpose even before the mercury rises. Add 30°C temperatures to crumbling infrastructure and everything melts.
And then there is the timing. Our exam season still falls almost perfectly into the likeliest heatwave period. Teenagers spend two years preparing for GCSEs and A-levels only to sit them in sweltering exam halls where concentration is compromised. We have normalised this simply because that is how it has always been done. But why?
Other countries, like the United States, organise their academic calendars differently: schools finish for the summer weeks before the hottest season. Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece are among countries that also structure their terms around local climate, ending in mid-June.
In Britain, the climate has changed faster than our institutions. None of this means children should spend every summer indoors in air-conditioned bubbles. Nor does every school need a multimillion-pound refurbishment overnight. But if heatwaves are becoming the norm, then public services need to adapt.
That means investing in school buildings designed for hotter summers as well as colder winters and giving schools the resources for basic cooling measures instead of expecting staff to muddle through.
And it also means revisiting workplace guidance regarding temperatures to make sense of Britain in 2026. Unless schools catch up, many may need to close before one becomes the scene of an entirely avoidable disaster.
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